The parents would have liked to send John to Harrow school: but, this
being finally deemed too expensive, he was placed in the Rev. John
Clarke's school at Enfield, then in high repute, and his brothers
followed him thither. The Enfield schoolhouse was a fine red-brick
building of the early eighteenth century, said to have been erected by a
retired West India merchant; the materials "moulded into designs
decorating the front with garlands of flowers and pomegranates, together
with heads of cherubim over two niches in the centre of the building."
This central part of the facade was eventually purchased for the South
Kensington Museum, and figures there as a screen in the structural
division. The schoolroom was forty feet long; the playground was a
spacious courtyard between the schoolroom and the house itself; a
garden, a hundred yards in length, stretched beyond the playground,
succeeded by a sweep of greensward, with a "lake" or well-sized pond:
there was also a two-acre field with a couple of cows. In this
commodious seat of sound learning, well cared for and well instructed so
far as his school course extended, John Keats remained for some years.
He came under the particular observation of the headmaster's son, Mr.
Charles Cowden Clarke, not very many years his senior. He was born in
1787, fostered Keats's interest in literature, became himself an
industrious writer of some standing, and died in 1877. Keats at school
did not show any exceptional talent, but he was, according to Mr. Cowden
Clarke's phrase, "a very orderly scholar," and got easily through his
tasks. In the last eighteen months of his schooling he took a new lease
of assiduity: he read a vast deal, and would keep to his book even
during meals. For two or three successive half-years he obtained the
first prize for voluntary work; and was to be found early and late
attending to some translation from the Latin or the French, to which he
would, when allowed his own way, sacrifice his recreation-time. He was
particularly fond of Lempriere's "Classical Dictionary," Tooke's
"Pantheon," and Spence's "Polymetis": a line of reading presageful of
his own afterwork in the region of Greek mythology. Of the Grecian
language, however, he learned nothing: in Latin he proceeded as far as
the AEneid, and of his own accord translated much of that epic in
writing. Two of his favourite books were "Robinson Crusoe" and
Marmontel's "Incas of Peru." He must also have made so